Babylon never legally owned its bay bottoms due to an obscure legislative oversight

Evidence

“I said, ‘Tell me more, Willard.’ He said, ‘I think I’ve told you enough. You go and see this [Hildreth] fellow in Amityville and you tell him I told him to talk to you.’ I did, and Hildreth said that way back, in 1848 maybe or 1856, two bills had been introduced in the Legislature. See, before that, the underwater rights in the bay, the bay bottoms, had belonged to the state. But one of these two bills transferred the rights in Nassau County to the various towns in Nassau along the bay and the other transferred the rights in Suffolk to the various Suffolk towns. Well, everyone on Long Island always just assumed that both of these had passed, but Hildreth told me that when he and Judge Reed had looked into it, they had found that for some reason no one seemed to know, maybe just an oversight, only one passed—the Nassau one. … “I said, ‘Do I gather then that half the bay bottom belongs to the state? That Babylon doesn’t own its bay bottom at all?’ And I put all our bloodhounds on it and I found those bills, and I found that Hildreth’s story was true. … Well, in all this time, the supervisors could have gotten the ownership of those lands transferred without any trouble, but I guess they had just decided to let things lie and had kept issuing licenses to fish the bay bottoms when they had no right to. And so I blackjacked them. We told them that we’d trade them the [Jones Beach] land for the bay bottoms. Well, they didn’t want to trade. They didn’t want to give the land. But we told them that if they didn’t, we’d let the people know that the town didn’t own the bay bottom after all, that they’d been issuing licenses when they had no right to, that in all the years that had been available to remedy the mistake, they had never taken the simple step of obtaining title to the bay bottoms, that they had been negligent in their stewardship of the town’s ‘sacred heritage.’ ” To be convicted in the public eye of such negligence would have been even worse for them than to give away the barrier beach. — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker, 1038

Categorization

• SEED: A dormant legal error hidden for generations becomes a lever — the phrase ‘sacred birthright’ being weaponized against its owners reads like the premise for an essay on how archival accidents decide who wins.
• QUESTION: Was the second bill truly lost by accident, or suppressed? Moses asserts an innocent oversight, but a purged county record and a missing decision suggests deliberate destruction.